The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  Four

  THANKS TO the film festival, and Philippa’s photos of Paris in the twenties, I knew they were out there, the lesbians: sleeping by day, rising in the deepest blue of evening to shake out their marcelled locks, slither into their satins or buckle up their tweeds, and stalk out into the night (which they were not “taking back”; they had never let it slip through their fingers). Having whispered the password at the speakeasy door, they’d be dancing against each other, kissing the napes of each other’s long necks, winding together like wisps of smoke, like vines; so beautiful, they’d escaped their bodies altogether. Drifting home at dawn, they’d nod their cloaked heads to M. Swann, off to Odette’s by the back way.

  I had only to find them. But how? Of course, the library—this was the only way I knew how to find anything. I settled in the most conspicuous reading chair with The Importance of Being Earnest and waited for someone like Philippa or Djuna Barnes to go by.

  Some hours passed, but as I left, I caught sight of the Women’s Community Bulletin Board, and there, nestled among notices for Cordon Bleu cooking lessons; Jazzercize classes; a lecture on Empowerment; a photography show: Wommyn and Their Cats; the meetings for rape crisis and chronic fatigue; the number for the battered women’s shelter, there it was—The Lesbian Support Group, 371 Hereford Street, #1A, Friday at 6 P.M.

  * * *

  I WORE the Nancy Kissinger shoes, of course, and black silk pants, my shirt with French cuffs, because Philippa thought cuff links were so commanding, and my hair pinned up loosely in my great-grandmother’s pearl and sapphire barrette, because she had lived in the twenties so I thought it might help me fit in. At 6:15 exactly, I rang the bell at 371 Hereford Street, one of the triple-deckers the city was made of, with a deep porch, front doors with oval windows—a place where there had once been lace curtains and probably a hydrangea tree in the yard, though it was all ragweed and Queen Anne’s lace now, with a half-full beer bottle nestled in the mangy hedge.

  They buzzed me back—I felt the current surge into the lock and turned the knob as if I were about to enter one of the realms children stumble into in books, full of wondrous terrors, true to dream life rather than real life, but true all the same. At Sweetriver we’d played at being students, artists, lovers, protesters, homosexuals—now I was going to be a lesbian for real: clear of gaze, looking out from a chosen pinnacle instead of the swamp I’d been born into; above the terrible longings I’d once felt for men. I trembled on this threshold, closed my eyes for a second in something like prayer, and opened the door …

  To find myself face to face with a heavyset, middle-aged woman who apparently acted as her own barber, and who, from her solid vantage point (she was leaning on a very thick cane), looked me up and down with something like suspicion.

  “May we help you?”

  “Is this the Lesbian Support Group?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And who might you be?” she asked.

  “Beatrice,” I said, feeling very small. “Beatrice Wolfe.” At Sweetriver it had been Bay-ah-trrree-chay.

  She stared at my outstretched hand as if a handshake was a custom she’d witnessed in an anthropological documentary but never actually tried, but finally she took it and gave it a squeamish squeeze.

  “God, that makes nine!” someone behind her said. “Can you play second base?”

  “I don’t think so,” said the first, with a smile that suggested her curiosity had been satisfied; she had divined all my secrets and would be willing, for a price, to keep them. “You don’t play second base, do you, Beatrice?”

  “No,” I admitted, “I don’t.”

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. “What do you do? No, wait, wait, you’re a waitress in a soda shopp-ee, right? Or, a veterinarian’s assistant? You’re nice to little pussycats?”

  I knew what she meant—I looked like Bo-peep dressed up as Vita Sackville-West. I was too pink-cheeked, too hopeful by miles, and while this might have counted toward beauty in another era, now it just looked naive. We’re spinning through an infinite, sterile universe on a planet whose peoples periodically tear each other to shreds—and this is little Beatrice, all dressed up and wanting to shake your hand. At Sweetriver we strove relentlessly to gain experience—to rid ourselves of our tacky exuberance and replace it with the appropriate cynicism, contempt, boredom at the very least. Philippa used to accuse me of reading Wordsworth in secret when she didn’t approve of my dress, and in a way, she was right: my obvious longing for a time when personal sadness, a betrayal, for instance, or a death, wasn’t dwarfed into meaninglessness by a century of mass horror and grief was unseemly.

  “Never mind,” she said, as I fumbled for an answer. She stepped back and swung the cane aside for me in a gesture of chivalry, as if she was holding a door. “Come in.”

  I entered with eyes downcast, a pilgrim who’d finally reached her shrine. The air was rich with the smell of bean soup and apple pie, the windows were steamed over, a cat round and black as a bowling ball was kneading one of the afghans that covered the sofa and every single chair. The conversation had ceased on my entrance, and the faces turned toward me were as solemn as if I’d crashed an SDS meeting. Even their clothing—denim, flannel, a Guatemalan sweater, a T-shirt equating women with fish and men with bicycles, was earnest and serious and committed to social change.

  “Welcome,” the woman on the cane boomed, apparently speaking for them all.

  “Hi, everybody,” I said, “I’m Beatrice Wolfe.”

  “Pat,” she said, so firmly that for a minute I wondered if my name was really Pat, and she was correcting my mistake. Then, looking at my empty hands, she said “It’s potluck,” with great disapproval.

  “Excuse me?” She’d been drowned out by a burst of indignant agreement among the other women, who had resumed their discussion after giving me a quick look up and down.

  “It’s potluck,” she said again. “Potluck. Everybody brings a dish. What did you bring?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. The notice just said ‘support group.’”

  “Fine,” she snapped. “You can do the dishes.”

  “Okay,” I said, taken aback. There would be a great many dishes to do, judging from the array of breads and casseroles on the table, the pots bubbling on the stove, and the sweets lined up on the counter in front of mason jars filled with whole grains. Everything here was wholesome and maternal—it ought to be a pleasure to wash dishes in this warm, fragrant place.

  A young woman, slim as a boy, with a cowlick and bowed legs, brought me a glass of wine and complimented my cuff links.

  “I’m Reenie,” she said. “I guess you don’t play softball?” She didn’t sound at all sorry—she touched my sleeve with wonder as if I were a tropical butterfly seldom glimpsed in these climes.

  It was true that no colony of goodwives would have outdone this roomful of Sapphists for rectitude. Hair was cropped and fingernails bitten, the corners of mouths were pulled down and would not rise until peace, love, and harmony reigned over the earth. If any of these women had ever yielded to the sight of her own loveliness in the mirror, feeling simple, blessed happiness as if she were picking an armful of lilacs on a May morning, she had disavowed that pleasure by now. The pliant curves of cheek and lips, the soft waves of hair—the qualities that comprise the dream of woman, the longing for women—these had been disavowed in favor of a firm stolidity such as would be an excellent quality in, say, an ambulance driver during a world war. Their voices admitted no ambiguity, and their breasts swung under their turtlenecks, exciting as udders. Compared to them, I was a soap bubble, and Reenie gazed at me happily while the others talked on.

  “Soup’s on!” Pat said, and no one loitered.

  “Sit anywhere?” someone asked as we approached the table.

  “As long as it’s boy-girl, boy-girl,” I sang, and saw eight perplexed faces turn in my direction, deciding whether to take offense.

  “It’s come-as-you-are and sit where you
please,” Pat said, with a quick, resentful glance at me. “No place cards.”

  I spoke very severely to myself, asking whether I wanted merely to carry on the masculine tradition of objectification, or whether I cared about women’s souls. After all, I was searching for authenticity, and these women were resolutely without artifice; if they were to find one little tendril of artifice curling out of themselves they would instantly tweeze it away. So then, they were my people—genuine, sensible, down to earth. I must strive to be more like them.

  “And no men,” Pat added, for good measure. A murmur of assent ran through the room, and as the dishes were passed around the table, everyone in turn had a story about the crass gender we’d spurned. My cheeks burned. I must withdraw; watch and listen more closely, try to transform myself. Reenie sat beside me, and the neat, slender woman who took the opposite chair glanced at me impassively. She hadn’t said a word since I arrived, and my imagination had leapt into the silence and turned her accidentally into Françoise Sagan. I smiled and she quickly looked away.

  Pat hated men, she said, more even than the rest of us, though her tense, pugnacious posture seemed a careful emulation of them. As she helped herself to the cheese and onion pie, she spoke of her father the butcher as if she’d been a slab on his hook.

  “It was like he didn’t speak English,” she said, “like his language was meat. ‘A nice brisket; a fine hind quarter.’ He’d be full of pride, roasting this thing that had been bleeding on the chopping block that afternoon.” She shuddered. “Barb, have some of the nut loaf.… is the sauce down there?”

  Barb pointed toward my right hand, which was resting near the sauce. “It’s not,” she said, once the sauceboat was under way, “that I haven’t felt attracted to men, on occasion…”

  “Well, I never have,” I said suddenly, and extremely surprisingly.

  “Never,” I repeated.

  “Maybe I should rephrase that,” Barb said. “Maybe attracted is too strong a word.”

  “Attracted,” Pat said, scornfully. If we knew, if we’d only seen what she had. Susan, her lover, who was as tall as a sunflower with the same bowed head, sat nodding. Susan’s husband, Pat was telling us, had broken a chair across her shoulders and had, as she was leaving him, taped a sign to the back of her car: STRIP ME GANG RAPE ME FUCK ME TO DEATH. That’s what men wanted for women, did we all understand? Pat had been working the desk at the women’s shelter the day Susan came in, one eye swollen shut, her ineffectual fist jammed into her mouth as if it could keep her from screaming, her peace so fragile that the sound of Pat stapling forms into her folder had startled her into sobs.

  “And the rest is history,” Susan said, with a smile, because they were here, after all, living the happiest ending imaginable, seated at the head and foot of this oaken table, serving barley salad and stuffed squash. To a person as hungry as myself, just looking down over the landscape of casseroles was a great satisfaction. The heavy candles flickered as if for a séance, and we seemed like a party of spirits, lost children come back to rattle the nursery windows and avenge ourselves on our betrayers, our faces aglow in the soft light, our hands busy with knives and ladles as we passed the steaming dishes along.

  What honest thing could I have said to them? “I came to transgress”? I opened my mouth and stuffed it with mashed potatoes, to prevent it from getting me into further trouble.

  Now a latecomer, a tall woman engulfed in a cowled sweater, took the last chair. She maintained a stately, authoritative silence that slowly drew all the attention, the sympathy—all the energy—in the room toward her. Was she in mourning? She was dressed in black, but she looked as if she’d never cried in her life.

  “Ginny,” Pat said, as if the name itself spoke volumes, “I’m so glad.” She sounded grateful, and Ginny nodded—gratitude was apparently the proper response. She would take just a little, she said—the squash, and a drop of the soup—there wouldn’t be any animal products?

  No, no, Pat rushed to reassure, of course not.

  Nor refined sugar?

  Certainly not.

  Though there was fish on the table, Pat said apologetically. It was sole. She would eat a placid fish, she explained—sole, or flounder, or scallops, which were so far down the scale of sentience and so delicious after only a minute under the broiler … but never a valiant fish, a salmon, or God forbid, a skate.

  “I don’t know why a sole should suffer for its nature,” Ginny said, “Nothing that lives ought to be eaten.” And she shuddered as if she had narrowly escaped being eaten herself.

  Pat, injured, countered that there were different ways to work for the good of the planet, that she, for instance, would never use water, a limited resource, to feed such a useless thing as a lawn. I gathered from her tone that Ginny must have had a fairly large front yard, perhaps even enough for croquet. Susan took up Pat’s cause, condemning ornamental growth, anything raised only to be cut, and soon there was general agreement that lawns were a brutal invention, grown for the pure pleasure of those who would mow them down.

  “In a word, men,” said Pat.

  “Better they take the testosterone out on the grass, than on you and me,” I said, by way of camaraderie. I had divined their trajectory and was determined to follow it out.

  At this, Ginny, who until now had seemed to be turning slowly to stone, snapped to life as if I had slapped her. “This is not something to joke about!” she said.

  “She doesn’t know what she’s saying, honey,” Barb said, covering Ginny’s hand with her own, glowering at me.

  “It just makes me so mad,” Pat started, “it just makes me furious to hear the things men do chalked up to testosterone. It’s like people think there’s no free will. There’s nothing a man can do that a woman can’t, and vice-versa.”

  I looked up and down the table. I’d expected the others would find it insulting to be lumped so summarily with a gender they felt they’d surmounted, but they seconded her loudly. They were like a school of fish, reversing direction in one unanimous flashing instant, so no matter what, they were all, always, pointed the same way. I was welcome as an eel. They were vying with each other, showing off how many rules they could follow, inventing new ones just to prove how obedient they were—even, swaggeringly, obeying two opposite rules at the same time.

  “Women are just as strong as men,” Pat continued. “I took down the Tae Kwon Do instructor at the Y on the very first day—and women aren’t out there beating each other up, shooting each other. There’s no hormonal reason a man has to mow a lawn, or kill a deer, or twist somebody’s arm, or … hurt anybody. It’s not normal, it’s not, and it deserves to be punished. Yes, it does.” She took a quick glance in Ginny’s direction and Ginny nodded, relaxing until she almost smiled.

  “Ginny, have some more squash,” Pat said. “Really, I made it for you.”

  Reenie, the young one with the cowlick who had hoped I could play second base, was sitting beside me, eating so hungrily, she was missing the conversation altogether.

  “I don’t know why, but I’m starving,” she told me, tearing off the heel of a baguette. There was a slight twang, Kentucky maybe, in her voice—like a squeeze of lemon. She laughed. “It’s not like I didn’t have a Big Mac right before I came.”

  Did she dare admit this? I laughed, and turned toward her, and as I did, I felt something ominous, like distant thunder. The woman across the table—Françoise Sagan in this epoch, but, possibly, Renée Vivien in the twenties (because I could see her in black tie and tails)—tensed, suddenly. Yes, I thought, she was dangerous and brooding, ready to try anything, her blank expression a mask covering the wild turbulence within.

  “Bonjour,” I said, smiling—Reenie’s ease had set me loose again, and I imagined Françoise would be delighted to meet another native speaker.

  “Hello,” she corrected. She’d seen that little spark jump between me and Reenie, and she was visibly troubled. She didn’t like seeing me talk to Reenie at all. So she was
interested! And my flicker of interest in her flashed over and involved, within seconds, the whole of my mind.

  Her name was not Françoise, in fact, but Lee, Lee Schuyler. She was slender and modest with dark hair in what we’d have called a pixie cut when I was young. Her complexion was thickly pocked—a lonely adolescence, then, spent in her own bedroom mostly, wishing, of course, for love. When she turned her face, I found something like beauty in the shape of her eyes, and every time she turned I looked for it again. She was a mystery: that was what I’d been missing. And of course, it would be a love mystery. Men could drill through the ocean floor, pierce the atmospheric envelope, harness the elements, fuse the elements, and smash the elements back to their original smithereens, but they’d left barely a footprint in the world of feeling. Mine, I thought in triumph, forgetting Reenie and turning toward Lee with all the force of my curiosity.

  The instant our eyes met, she looked away. So I’d been right—she liked me. And suddenly everything in Hartford was electrified by a divine battery that pulled all the scattered anxious atoms into orbit, and I felt that charge of attraction without which everything would fly apart into meaningless space. From that moment, I kept Lee in my sights, calculated my position according to hers. The dinner had ended and Susan was pouring coffee while Pat cut her peanut butter pie into absolutely equal portions. Lee was looking down the table with some consternation; I couldn’t bear to see her in want.

  “What is it?” I asked. I’d had that vision that strikes with love—as if I’d seen an X ray of her heart and knew just where the scars were, what was needed to heal them. “What do you need?”